By John Bates, founder of AXQ
Every couple of weeks another US software company announces its first European office. Usually London, sometimes Dublin or Amsterdam. There is a ribbon, a quote about “growing demand across the region”, a new general manager hired from a bigger name, and a line near the bottom saying the company will grow “through a combination of direct sales and channel partnerships”.
That last line is where most of the real work sits, and it is the part that gets the least thought.
I spent five years at TD SYNNEX as key account lead for AWS, Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia, responsible for EMEA partner go-to-market. A lot of that time was spent watching vendors arrive in Europe. The ones that did well were rarely the ones with the best office or the biggest launch. They were the ones that had made a handful of plain decisions about partners before they started signing them.
Here are the decisions I would want answered in the first ninety days.
The first ninety days
Six decisions, before you sign anyone.
What is a partner actually for, here?
“Channel” covers very different jobs. A reseller who adds your product to an existing customer base is not doing the same thing as a systems integrator who designs a deployment, or an MSP who runs it every month, or a distributor who handles credit, logistics and the long tail of smaller resellers.
In the US you may have grown with one of those. In Europe you will probably need two, and they will not be the same two in every country. The first job is to write down, in one sentence each, what you need a partner to do that your own team cannot. If you cannot write that sentence, you are not ready to recruit.
One country first, properly
The UK is a sensible first market for most US companies. Same language, familiar contracts, a dense partner community, and a lot of European buyers who will look at a UK reference before they look anywhere else.
But “the UK first” only works if it actually means first. Signing a German reseller because they came to you at a trade show, while the UK is still half built, splits a small team across two markets that behave differently. Get one market to the point where a partner can sell without you in the room. Then use that as the template.
Regulation is a sales conversation, not a footnote
European buyers ask different questions. Where does the data sit. Who can see it. How does this fit with GDPR, NIS2, DORA, the EU AI Act, or whatever their own regulator has published this year. In regulated sectors, those questions come before price and before features.
This is where good partners earn their place. A local integrator who already has the trust of a bank’s security team, and can answer those questions in the room, is worth more than a reseller with a long customer list. Recruit for that trust, not for reach.
Decide how partners make money before you sign them
Partners are businesses. They will put effort where the margin, the services opportunity and the renewals are. A programme that only pays a discount on the licence, with no room for assessments, deployment work or managed services, will attract partners who sell you occasionally and never build a practice around you.
The question to answer is simple: if a partner puts two people on your product for a year, how do they make that worth it? If you do not have an answer, they will work it out for themselves, and the answer is usually “not yet”.
One owner, with enough authority
The most common pattern I saw was a partner programme announced, a few partners signed, and then very little pipeline. Usually the cause was not the partners. It was that nobody inside the vendor owned the outcome with enough authority to fix things: deal registration that took a week, sales teams paid to go direct, marketing funds nobody could access.
Before you recruit, decide who owns partner-sourced pipeline in Europe, what they are measured on, and what they can change without asking permission.
Measure the boring things early
Partner revenue takes time. In the meantime, track what tells you it is coming: how many partners have trained people, how many have run a customer assessment, how many deals they have registered, how long it takes you to respond. If those numbers are flat after a quarter, the revenue will be too.
The short version
Decide it on purpose, early.
The office, the GM and the press release are the visible parts of a European launch. The partner model is the part that decides whether it works. It does not need to be complicated. It does need to be decided on purpose, early, and owned by someone.
If you are working through any of this at the moment, I am always happy to compare notes.
John Bates, AXQ